Being a free speech advocate, my first instinct has been to defend Jon Gruden. But I have managed thus far to exercise a rare display of discipline and not do that. Gruden did, after all, say some nasty stuff, albeit in what he thought were private email exchanges.
Instead of defending Gruden, or conversely, piling on with some faux outrage against someone less righteous than me (the new American hobby), I'll talk about the over the top responses to the whirling teacup absurdity of the last few days.
There's actually a bunch of different angles to take and things to consider, so let's start the discussion with the underpublicized obvious, as usual.
1) The NFL claims it didn't leak the emails. The NFL sat on the Gruden emails for months.
Well, I do buy this. The NFL as an institution sitting on the Gruden emails is zero surprise. I mean, c'mon, be serious. The NFL, as an entity, exposing itself by volunteering emails to the NFLPA or the public? Among the 650,000 non-Gruden emails, there's undoubtedly some worse exchanges than anything we've thus far seen. Why would the NFL leak the Gruden emails? They got religion? They got woke? As they say on ESPN, "C'mon, man!"
2) Somebody hates Gruden and leaked them specifically to torpedo him.
Well, duh. As the Punisher says, "It's not vengeance; it's punishment." Yeah, the Game of NFL Clue suspect leaker list includes some obvious names, such as Goodell himself (never call your boss a pussy in public), DeMaurice Smith (who was up for re-election), and the president of Goodyear (never promote French tires at the expense of American).
3) The NFL will not be releasing more emails.
LOL. No kidding, Sherlock.
Headline Comedy
I have seen some of the most adolescent, ridiculous, fantasyland headlines the last few days. I'll mention just a few.
William Brangham of PBS and William Roden (TheUndefeated.com) want to snuff out "Grudenism" by learning the names of Gruden's "enablers." Mr. Brangham and Mr. Roden, you both need to not just wake up and smell the coffee. You need to douse yourselves with a full pot of scalding joe. A list of "enablers of Grudenism?" Pretty hilarious. You'd wind up canceling half the NFL owners, half the execs, and pretty much hand the NFL over to the players' union, not that there's anything Seinfeldian wrong with that. Yeah, that'll happen.
Next up, and I hesitate because I'm a big fan of USA Today's Nancy Armour, "Opinion: John Gruden's vile emails will taint NFL until it comes clean about Washington investigation."
Ms. Armour, I'll break this to you gently. The NFL is pretty vile. Vile is as vile does. If Gruden's emails tainted the NFL, the whole batch of emails would smell like an 18-wheeler that just plowed through a surfeit of skunks. As to the NFL ever "coming clean?" I once knew a small town bookmaker who lived a couple of blocks from our house. He was in the shower when the police busted down his front door. He descended the stairs wrapped in a towel and announced, "Hey fellas, I'm clean!" My point is, unless there are warrants, nobody is coming clean.
Carron Phillips from Deadspin's headline, "Jon Gruden is the perfect example of how mediocre white men get to thrive in the workplace."
Yowza. Let me process that for a moment. So, first of all, we are to accept that coaching NFL teams is concomitant with your usual workplaces. Okay, if you say so. The idea is that Gruden has rotated in and out of the 32 highest paying and most expert jobs in football, and was hired for the highest profile football broadcasting job, despite his being "mediocre?" Really? And undoubtedly it was the old white boys' club that was primarily responsible for this as opposed to Jon Gruden's skills or attributes? That's a lot of stretching, a la Reed Richards, one might say.
Saying somebody is "mediocre" because they were "only barely above .500" coaching in the NFL is like saying that somebody is "mediocre" because they only finished eighth in the Olympic mile with a 4:01. One would hope Phillips read Gruden's biography before proclaiming Gruden's "mediocrity." I have a copy here if he wants to borrow it.
Mr. Phillips, not all events you witness in life teach meta-lessons. I think you've been watching too many of those meta-lesson Disney flicks. My suggestion -- lay off the Disney. And lay off proclaiming unmerited speculative conclusions without real data, and then using them as headlines because you'll garner applause.
Moving on from Mr. Phillips, I saw "racist" used as an adjective before Gruden's name in several articles. Because Gruden referred to a black man's lips as resembling Michelin tires. And that was it. Understand, there were a boatload of Gruden emails, and that was the most racist thing they found. So now "racist" precedes Gruden's name as an adjective.
Gruden is being labeled racist because referring to the size of a black person's lips is considered a trope. I looked up the word "trope," and the definition is "a figurative or metaphorical use of a word or expression." I don't think Gruden was being figurative or metaphorical. I think he was being nasty. That doesn't necessarily make him racist in the common parlance. I say that because "being a racist" seems to be one of those things, like pornography, that no one can define but that everyone claims they know when they see it. I have issues with this flowing, subjective definition, but we'll tackle that another day.
The Righteous in Judgement
The Righteous judge the Less-than-Righteous. I'm not sure what that accomplishes except to garner standing ovations and maybe sell Righteousness uniforms on the side that one can wear in public.
There's much more to cover regarding all of this, including Adam Schefter being criticized for his handing his drafts to sources for editing. I'll have a bit to say about that. And I wanted to mention that I'll be doing a piece about Lamar Jackson, who played an absolutely brilliant game Monday night. This is two years in a row where Jackson saved me in Last Man Standing contests by engineering fantastic comebacks with no margin for error. What does that have to do with Gruden? Well, Lamar Jackson has a nose like...you'll have to read that entry to see.
Conclusion
Colin Kaepernick was, of course, correct. The NFL is a white man's monopoly, like a Who's Who of modern slave owners. And that's why the NFL settled with Kaepernick rather than allow its executive emails to see the light of day.
But who didn't know this already? And who could possibly be shocked, shocked I tell you, by the Gruden emails?
Good luck with the NFLPA getting access to those 650,000 non-Gruden emails. I wonder if any of the offshores have a line on that.
Bob Dietz
October 13, 2021
